Paige McLoughlin’s Reviews > The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge > Status Update

How the game of life could make a working Turing machine, which would be Turing complete, in that it could compute anything a Turing machine could compute. In other words, it could be a universal or near-universal, depending on quantum computing.

Self-reproducing Von Neumann probes and more on the game of life.

Physics and Cosmology as it stood in the eighties, from the Big Bang to the heat death. Some of it still stands, but some of it has been superseded by later developments in things like dark matter and dark energy, and current cosmology.

Recursion in Physics and Math, and some early games from the early days of computation.

Shannon's information theory from his work in communication technology at Bell Labs, and how information has an entropy to it.

An excursion into entropy and the second law of thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon which seems to break it and how Leo Szilard showed actually no information storage and erasing that knowledge to operate a Maxwell demon manipulating particles creates more entropy than the gains of sorting molecules.

Delving more deeply into the patterns in Conway's game of life, things that grow and die, and things that oscillate in different patterns or move across the screen like gliders or glider guns.

A wide-ranging introduction to Von Neumann architectures from Computers to monkeys on a typewriter, to the cellular automata of Conway's game of life.

Just started reading again.